Black Sands Swim Squad (BSSS) swimmers smashed 4 National records and brought home 33 medals from the Barbados Long Course National Championships, which took place from the 27th February to the 3rd March 2024.
All seven of the competing BSSS swimmers managed to get themselves onto the medal podium and the results were as follows:
- Kennice Greene won 6 golds and silver and whilst doing so, broke her 100m freestyle National record, reducing the time from 1:01.93 to 1:01.09 minutes. She also broke the 50m butterfly record previously held by Shne’ Joachim with a time of 29.42 seconds and reduced it to a time of 29.25 seconds.
- Matthew Ballah won 3 golds and 2 silver medals and also re-wrote the record books, breaking the 50m backstroke record, previously held by Brandon George in a time of 28.87 reducing the time to 28.78.
- Brandon George won 2 golds and 3 silver medals and also claimed a National record in the 100m backstroke, beating his previous record time of 1:02.47 and reducing it to 1:02.11.
- Abigail Deshong won 2 golds, 2 silvers and 3 bronze medals, whilst her younger brother, Kione Deshong brought home 3 golds, 1 silver and 1 bronze medal.
- Kevern DaSilva returned home with 1 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals and Seth Byron was able to bring back home 2 bronze medals.
BSSS Head Coach, Kyle Dougan expressed his extreme delight at the results by ALL of the swimmers and said “All seven swimmers swam extremely well especially since they recently attended the local Gallagher Invitational Swimming Championships. Their intense training schedule leading up to Carifta 2024 is extremely difficult, so to perform at such a high standard in the middle of very hard training is applaudable.”
Six of the seven BSSS swimmers will be attending CARIFTA 2024 and hoping to return with medals.